Engineer's Daughter

edgar müller's 3d street art

Artist Edgar Müller specializes in some crazy-impressive pavement trompe l'oeil.  If you stand at the right spot near one of his paintings it might suddenly seem as if the earth has opened up at your feet or that you are in danger of a sneaky sidewalk shark attack, but it's naught but one of Müller's fabricated catastrophes.  See more of his work on his site at the link above or in the gallery here.

new york street artist poster boy: on the wall

As culture jams go, my favorites have always been the ones that make bold alterations to existing advertisements and billboards, taking the piss out of consumerism and Madison Avenue alike.  New York street artist Poster Boy has been brilliantly and anonymously tweaking subway ads for about a year now with little more than a razor and a wicked sense of humor.  And, unlike Banksy, he gives in-person interviews.  Ben Walters talked to him for the Guardian:

Witty and playful as it is, there's no missing the political edge of Poster Boy's work, rooted in indignation at what he calls "this mass advertising always attacking people. They don't have a choice: they're riding the subway, they already paid their two dollars. Why the fuck should they be force-fed this stuff?" As well as consumerism, his pieces have targeted racism, gentrification, gender inequality, US immigration and foreign policy (for Transporter read "Deported"; for Iron Man, read "Iran = Nam") and, recently, Israeli action in Gaza.

To see some examples of Poster Boy's adbusting, click through to the gallery here or check out his Flickr stream.  I love the ones where he pixelates posters using the grids formed by the subway tile as a sort of graph paper, and I also have to appreciate a street artist who can punnily reference Rauschenberg.  I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for his work when I'm in New York later this spring, that's for sure.